How to Connect with Customers
Businesses are always trying to find tips for connecting with their customers better.
Techniques for building rapport. Tricks for winning customer loyalty. If you’re working at one of these companies, I have some Good News and some Bad News for you…
The Bad News
You can’t trick your way to getting a customer’s loyalty. You have to earn it. There’s no shortcut to the promised land of customer relationships — you have to take the long way ’round (they call it “going the extra mile” for a reason).
The Good News
There actually are techniques and tips that can help you connect with your clients and form personal rapport in your daily interactions.
The Better News
You already know what to do and how to do it, you’re just choosing not to.
Here’s how to connect with your customers
- Speak to them like a human being instead of like a Sales Lead or a Business Prospect you’re trying to get money out of.
- Care more about them getting what they need than you getting what you need.
- Try to help them instead of trying to close them.
- Be available when they need you. If your customers consistently need help before or after your business hours, then your business is open during the wrong hours.
- Stay in touch. Don’t just bash them over the head with marketing and sales messages during your big annual sales push (remember all those holiday sale emails that flooded your inbox in November and December? Have you received any messages from them since the end of the year?). Offer your customers insight and advice to improve their businesses and increase their profits. If they’re more successful, they’ll have more business for you.
If you’re a legitimate business person, you didn’t start your company with the intent to just grab as much cash out of your customer’s pockets as possible and shove it into your own.
You got into business to help other people.
To serve the needs of a group that would value what you bring to the world.
Be a partner, not just a proprietor.
